Same Sea,Different Ponds: Cross-Sectorial Knowledge Spillovers in the North Sea

Knowledge spillovers are crucial to innovation and upgrading, but it is largely unclear what knowledge spillovers are made of and how they actually happen. The importance of Marshall–Arrow–Romer vs. Jacobs externalities is also a debated matter, whereas the concept of “related variety” has recently come to occupy a middle-ground position. However, the relatedness concept is ambiguous in terms of operationalization and emphasizes codified knowledge on behalf of other knowledge resources that are important for innovation, particularly if firms cross into new sectors. This paper sheds light on the “black box” concepts of knowledge spillovers and relatedness by exploring cross-sectorial transfers from the mature offshore oil and gas sector into the emerging offshore wind industry. A qualitative research design allows for a more nuanced understanding of the contents of knowledge spillovers and (un)relatedness between sectors.     

Primitive Liberals and Pirate Tribes: Black-Flag Radicalism and the Kibbo Kift

ABSTRACT

The Age of Catastrophe (1914–1945) has long been considered a crisis of liberalism. As a political platform and moralistic worldview, the hollowness of liberalism’s promise was exposed when total war struck at the heart of Europe, undermining its presumption of imperial hegemony over much of the world. What emerged in its wake, amid the swells of irremediable nationalisms, is the subject of this article. Blinded by the fog of war and bright lights of modernity, historians often fail to catch the glimpses of alternative aspirations, which escaped the age’s ruptures so as to reinvent and redeem humanity from the depths of its bloody past. Against a backdrop of neglected case studies from Britain and elsewhere – from the Luddites to the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift – this article seeks to show how the spectre of death inspired new ideals of youth and civility that rejected the arrogance of imperial masculinity and industrialised oppression, turning instead to visions of global kinship that were socialist and anarchic, romantic and utopian, primitive and piratical.     

Pre-industrial headstones across the continental North Sea plain

This paper examines the spatial and temporal distribution of grave headstones in the relatively homogeneous North Sea plain and adjacent regions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the various lithological, cultural, religious and transportation factors influencing this distribution. Findings from close inspection of cemeteries across the study area were complemented with data from existing surveys. The larger part of the production of headstones was for local consumption. High densities of cruciform (Catholic) headstones in the Boulonnais and in most of the Ardennes–Rhenish massif are illustrated with the cases of the Berwinne and Vesdre headstone production workshops. Beyond concentrations along the Meuse and Rhine rivers, there is a large area stretching from northern France to north-west Germany in which no headstones can be found (with the notable exception of a few Jewish cemeteries). Beyond this area devoid of headstones, the Marsh Islands and adjacent continental areas again have high densities (more than 1 headstone per km²), occurring in two well-differentiated clusters. One cluster contains simple poles in Belgian Palaeozoic limestone in North-Holland and the West-Frisian islands, and the other cluster, on the German and Danish Marsh Islands, holds richly decorated tablets made in sandstone from the Weserbergland. The headstones on the Marsh Islands, a unifying cultural element in this UNESCO world heritage area, bear witness to the significance of a lucrative whaling activity and the intense trade that developed despite political, religious and linguistic differences across the region.